ABSTRACT
On the thirteenth of March Ping and I left the farm for Urga with a tightly packed wagon-load of several thousand fine skins. The cold had been greatly decreasing of late, and the sun shone day after day from an azure sky, across which small white clouds drifted now and then like light swansdown blown over the vault of heaven. When we rode through the deep gorges, they appeared high up, like fantastic images and formations, to vanish again behind the mountain crest on the other side of the valley. But when we rode over the steppe they thrust up far, far away on the horizon, like proud frigates majestically ploughing forward over the blue vault of heaven. Thus the cloud shapes changed eternally, and the great silence of nature gave us a sense of purity and beauty—as always when a human being is alone in magnificent scenery.
